Shadowy CSS, Bitcoin Mining, Graphics API, Date Design

Build a Cheap Bitcoin Mine — some day it will be revealed that the act of generating a bitcoin token is helping the Russian mafia to crack nuclear missile launch codes and Afghan druglords built the Bitcoin system to destabilize the US dollar.

Polycode — a free, open-source, cross-platform framework for creative code. You can use it as a C++ API or as a standalone scripting language to get easy and simple access to accelerated 2D and 3D graphics, hardware shaders, sound and network programming, physics engines and more. The core Polycode API is written in C++ and can be used to create portable native applications. Lua interfaces. (via Joshua Schachter)

Flickr Date Design — interesting thoughts on Flickr’s date design. The date your photos was taken is stored in a MySQL datetime technically giving you the ability to label your photo as being taken solidly 800+ years before anything most of us would describe as the invention of photography. Which is a little silly.[…]Fundamentally this split between system activity time, and human editable creation date models a world where the people who use your software do something other then use your software. You have to decide how you feel about admitting that possibility. (via Nelson Minar)

Duplicates Detection with ElasticSearch (Andre Zmievski) — duplicate detection (or de-duping) is one of the most unappreciated problems that the developers of certain types of applications face sooner or later. The applications I’m talking about share two main characteristics: item collection and some sort of social aspect.

Zork Pen, Clever Web Design, iPhone Library, and Text Layout

Zork and Tic-Tac-Toe on a LiveScribe Pen (YouTube) — this guy totally ported the Z-Machine so he can play Zork on his pen. My favourite bit is the comment from Infocom founder Scott Cutler: As the implementer who wrote the first Z-machine for the TRS-80 some 30 years ago and one﻿ of the founders of Infocom, I was thrilled and impressed to see what you did. I can guarantee you that we never imagined it would be played with a pen! (via Joe Johnston and Jason Scott)

Amazon Sold 158 Items/Second on Cyber Monday (TechCrunch) — I remember when 20 hits/s on a Sun web server was considered pretty friggin’ amazing. Just pause a moment and ponder the infrastructure Amazon has marshaled to be able to do this: data centers, replication, load balancers, payment processing, fulfillment, elastic cloud computing, storage servers, cheap power, bandwidth beyond comprehension.

Quick Thoughts on Pinboard (Matt Haughey) — thoughtful comments, and an immediate and just as thoughtful response. (I am a happy pinboard user who is also looking forward to the social networking features to come)

How one vowel creates a limiting design paradigm

The first group/publisher/company/person who moves away from the ebook and to content — content that can be delivered to a variety of media, digital and non-digital, with display and style applied separate from and after content creation — wins.

At the StartWithXML Forum in New York in January, Rebecca Goldthwaite of Cengage gave a great demonstration of how Cengage uses CSS in their XML workflow. Many publishers regard style sheets as an invitation to create cookie-cutter book production, with the fear that all their books will look the same. This is emphatically a myth. Have a look at her…